


We'll Find Our Own Way Home Somehow

by nonisland



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Angels, Episode: s04e10 Heaven and Hell, Episode: s05e13 The Song Remains the Same, Female Friendship, Fix-It, Gen, Hell, Rarewomen Treat, Religious Themes & References, i'm in your canon de-refrigerating your women
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-15
Updated: 2013-04-15
Packaged: 2017-12-08 13:42:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/761983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonisland/pseuds/nonisland
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“Isn’t it supposed to be ‘an angel of the Lord’?” she asks as flippantly as she can.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	We'll Find Our Own Way Home Somehow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [brutti_ma_buoni](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brutti_ma_buoni/gifts).



> **contains:** vaguely described torture; oblique references to canonical past abuse; canon-typical violence; (anti-)religious themes and references
> 
> Thanks to **innershift** for looking this over for me; any errors remaining are entirely my own. Title is from the Editors’ “Papillon”:  
>  “If there really was a God here  
> He’d have raised a hand by now
> 
> Darling, you’re born, get old, then die here   
>  Well, that’s quite enough for me   
>  We’ll find our own way home somehow...”
> 
> * * *
> 
> Should you find something, whilst reading one of my stories, that offends you/is incorrect/could offend others/is in any way problematic, please please _please_ do not hesitate to tell me. I will never spew hate at you, I will never attack you, and I will _always_ thank you for taking the time to let me know.

In the moment Anna’s grace burns back into her, like swallowing a star gone supernova, she is intimately aware of whole countries of sins and regrets drawn across every nearby human mind. She lets them run through her like sleet, quickly, but some cut harder than others.

The Winchesters are knots of grief and guilt to her overloading mind: person after person they didn’t save—parents, lovers, strangers, friends. And a foe.

She chases the knowledge (the bitter aftertaste of failure, cold condemnation, sharpened to acid by fear). It’s recent, so recent it’s just a step backwards for her, if she doesn’t die here and now, if she can find out. She will stop the small injustices her omnipotent father will not.

Bela Talbot. Damned; Hell-torn for less than a year.

Anna lets her focus shift just for a moment to the dark blur that is Ruby, with her twisted true face and disarming kindness, the bravest and most loyal damned soul Anna has ever known. Even in the fiercest instant of her first rebellion it would never have occurred to her to claw a prisoner from the depths of Hell for no reason other than that she _wanted_ to, but the Righteous Man is not the only worthy one to rise again to Earth. She knows that now.

The barn fades inexorably toward the merciless pure white of Heaven, of total angelic grace, with Ruby the last shadow remaining. Anna pushes time apart behind her and jumps.

* * *

Bela has not yet lost herself, and she has never lost her ability to be elsewhere when she needs to be.

This is how she thinks of it: in careful round sentences.

She is Bela. She is elsewhere. There is a ragged tattered soul torn apart and screaming, but it is not Bela. There is a blur of smoke making promises, terrible promises, beautiful promises, but Bela does not hear it. It is whispering in the soul’s ear, and Bela is wandering in the mists over Hell.

Light cuts the mist like a sword.

The distant pain stops. Everything stops. Bela has a confused impression of fire and sun, and then the smoke blows away. Something brighter than stars, with vast wings of flame, bends over the poor soul. The thing touches it, healing its wounds and breaking its bonds.

Bela feels herself drawn down from the mist, closer and closer to the soul and the miserable little cold room it huddles in.

There is a sickening moment of disorientation, and then she stares at her fingers, gone only a little ragged around the edges, and without a trace of smoke. Yet. They’re her fingers. She checks them every time.

She tries to look at her rescuer, but she can’t. “What _are_ you?” she asks.

*My name is Anna,* the…being…says. It’s speech without sound, somehow arriving in Bela’s mind without passing through her ears on the way. *I’m an angel.*

Bela tries to laugh. She can’t. She’s forgotten how, or maybe the ability was the first thing they cut out of her. She’s terrified half out of her mind and she _hates_ that she can’t make herself act like she isn’t. “Isn’t it supposed to be ‘an angel of the Lord’?” she asks as flippantly as she can.

Anna flickers, and then the room around them flickers too. It settles as a grim little cell made of grey stone like frozen smoke, and Anna is very nearly human-shaped. *No,* she says. *I am an angel of myself.* And then—and if it’s possible for such a voice to be wry, Anna’s is— *“Be not afraid?”*

“What do you want?” Bela asks. She is afraid. Of course she is. How could she not be? Angels aren’t real, she knows, but right now she’s willing to believe anyway.

*I want to—I can’t save you. I want to give you the chance to save yourself.* Anna reaches out an arm (she has arms, now; she almost has fingers) and touches Bela’s forehead. *Hell is perception,* she says, as if it’s a great effort.

Before Bela can say anything, Anna vanishes, blown out like a candle. Bela, deprived of any other target, curses at the empty room for a moment.

There is a door.

When she turns the handle it opens into a long stone corridor she recognizes from the medieval levels under a château in southern France. The owner had had a coronet that gave its wearer the ability to command the respect of anyone who saw them, and he’d hidden it...in the old fortress’s strongroom.

Realization breaks over Bela like sunrise, slow and beautiful.

She _is_ a great thief. She’s better than anyone else she knows.

_Hell is perception._

She wonders if her contract has taken physical form, if it’s waiting for her there in the old strongroom. If she can steal her own soul back.

* * *

It isn’t that simple, of course. Hell keeps changing around her, from rotting underground hallways to slick museum hallways—she trips an alarm she hadn’t expected to be there and has to disarm one of the “guards” who turns up to kill them all, which is messier than she’s ever liked to be—to an ancient ruin creaking alarmingly above her in the wind, and she’s moving for what seems like months, running and hiding and running again.

She doesn’t know what Anna did to her to let her weave through Hell like Theseus in the labyrinth, but she is acutely grateful. And acutely aware of her ever-mounting debt.

Her life is in a banker’s safe. She reaches it, the first of her treasures she’s ever gotten to, and doesn’t waste time cracking the lock. She’s forgotten the combination, and there is dynamite in her hand. She blows the door and snatches the roll of parchment within as all Hell lunges out of the shadows for her.

She wakes up.

She _wakes up_ , and there is no sound of howling, not even the faintest hint of sulfur. She’s sitting in a filthy, muddy alleyway, with rain pounding down on her, and she is entirely alive.

Bela Talbot has never believed in leaving things to chance. She has savings, still. She can put her life back together—or start something new, that won’t drag hunters straight back onto her trail.

She sits in the rain and cries until she laughs.

* * *

Michael calls her _Anna_ and her chosen name is frostbitten scorn on his tongue. Then he burns her from the inside out.

If she were what he thinks—weak and human-soft, bound to her body as surely as they are to theirs, or perhaps that she’d bound herself to Lucifer’s cause—it would have killed her just as he’d meant. But she’s more than that. She’s a traitor to Heaven and she hates Hell with all her grace and heart, and she loves humanity but she is not of it, and she slips out of her body as it blazes up and crumbles into ash.

Far in the future there’s a pinpoint of prayer.

Wounded almost unto death, dazed, helpless, Anna lets it pull her in, like a fish caught on a long, long line.

It isn’t prayer as she’s always known it. The petitioner asks God for nothing, asks no saints nor any other angels. It is her, Anna, they pray to, softly, constant and unthinking as a heartbeat: _I owe you. Let me help you._

Anna is drawn forward into a dreaming mind.

They are standing in a gallery, perhaps a museum or perhaps a warehouse, filled with slow thick light and long, long staircases. Anna is standing on a balcony, or the landing to a flight of stairs. She can feel the sun pressing against her back, its heat like a weight.

“What are _you_ doing here?” Bela Talbot asks from the ground.

“I need—” She understands now why Castiel refused her over and over again. It is much harder to accept than to offer. She makes herself say it anyway: “I need your help.”

The dream shifts around them and Anna lets it take her. They’re in a park, traffic a distant hum beyond a heavy veil of trees. Bela looks her over thoughtfully, curiously, and under her clever wary gaze Anna feels as known as she did in Heaven, and less afraid.

“Heaven not all it’s cracked up to be?” Bela asks finally.

“It never was.”

“If you’re working for the other side—”

“Not Hell,” Anna says quickly. Maybe Hell is still worth saving, but it needs someone less emotional and weary than her to try. Someone less betrayed. “You. All of you. Humanity. You have a side, and I’m on it.”

Bela shakes her head.

Anna feels the burning of panic begin low at the base of her wings. If Bela won’t help her, she will die. It is that simple. She will die as surely she would have if she’d never crept into Hell before the siege began and let out someone whose obligation made her an anchor. She will drift, a broken wisp of celestial intent, until someone finds her. They would have had to kill her much more quickly in a body. She wishes she had just let Michael—

“Why should I believe you?” Bela asks.

“I was a general in Heaven’s armies.” Anna sits down on a bench she hadn’t noticed before. She is exhausted beyond exhaustion, a numb automaton of herself. Anna Milton is bubbling up more strongly through her than she has since the first few months of Heaven’s persuasion, and Anna Milton wants to sit down before she cries. “Just below an archangel in rank. I was great and terrible, and before he died my sibling Gabriel and I used to slip away from all that and watch the humans. They were so small, but so _bright_. I admired them so much. It wasn’t fair that they had to suffer, I thought. It wasn’t fair that so many of my siblings thought of them as, as vermin cluttering up Creation, like an unsightly social disease. So I tore out my grace and I Fell.”

Bela recoils. She has a gun in her hand, suddenly.

Anna curls her hand around the barrel and says, “I’m not a demon. I was born human. In—” She has to think about it. “Two thousand eight I got my grace back. That was when I rescued you.”

“But that was in—”

“I can—could—move differently through time. I exist in more dimensions than you do. But I was almost killed just now, over thirty years ago. There may be an archangel still hunting me. Heaven wants this war as much as Hell does, Bela.” She watches realization settle over Bela’s face, then be blown away by cool anger. “And I need someplace to hide.”

“My flat’s not big enough for a roommate,” Bela says. Her mouth draws up a little at one corner, but her eyes are grave.

Anna looks at Anna Milton’s hands. “I don’t exactly have a body right now. Gabriel taught me how to make one that’s all my own, and I did that before, but I’m not...”

When it’s obvious she won’t (can’t) finish, Bela says, “Strong enough.”

Anna nods. “I was...I can understand better, now, why humans would do anything to avoid death.”

“Can you hide here?” Bela asks.

“I think so.” Anna hesitates a moment longer. The trees arch closer together over her head, navelike; Bela is studying them with a focus that leaves Anna in no doubt that it was deliberate. “And then I need to try again to stop it all.”

“I don’t do good deeds,” Bela says. Disappointment stabs sharply through Anna, and then Bela continues, “but I _do_ do survival. If I can help, I will.”

Anna envisions herself at the head of another army, bright and dark and glorious, made of everyone who loves humanity, or hates Heaven and Hell, enough to save the only world she’s ever truly loved. The weight of it is terrifying. She’s done with leading armies.

But to be in this one, a rebel instead of a leader—that would be an honor, not a burden.

“You can,” she says. “Thank you.”


End file.
